At the crack of noon the next day, we were on our way to one of the lesser known locations in the Philippines. We definitely never hit any of the bigger name, resort islands like Cebu or Boracay, but we did decide to follow a similar travel path that our friend from City U had forged a couple week earlier. We took a bus south to the small city of Batangas, where we caught a rickety hour long “ferry” to the island of Mindoro. They had some troubles with the boat’s engine. It took some guy with a wrench and some bangin to get it runnin. Lonely Planet calls it a “Party Beach”, but I think that’s a bit of an over statement.

When we arrived, we bumped into this nice man who was headed in the same direction as us

. We split a jeepney, and dropped this guy off at his house. He saw that most of us were from Canada, and he put us in contact with a Canadian who ran a dive shop in Sabang (the particular beach we went to). He was kind enough to show us to a little hotel that was both clean and cheap, just off the beach. It wasn’t the best, I think it was called AAA something something. Our friends that had come earlier stayed at Big Apple Dive Resort and said it was great.

In the 4 days we were there, we did little more than just drink penny beers, eat strangely international cuisine, and lounge on the rocky beaches. The restaurants there were great, serving fresh, hot, simple food. They had this beer called Red Horse that didn’t seem too strong, but it will knock you on your ass. We swam and played pool at Big Apple (mind the pool, although it looks nice, its probably not the cleanest thing. In fact just don’t go into the pool, you’re better off), and chilled on the floating bar in the bay.

We quickly learned that Sabang was called a “Party Beach” for its ample prostitution. Nights would get kinda greasy as older western men would go on “dates” with the younger local women. Other than being driven from the Big Apple pool by some X-rated activities and one of our group member’s handing over our room key to a hooker, we had no problems

On our last day, we hired a boat to take us to a real beach that wasn’t littered with garbage and rocks. This guy took us to Talipanan, about 45 minutes by boat. The water was clear blue and we passed cove after cove of deserted white sand beaches before we arrived at ours. We had a huge Italian meal, messed about in the water and some of us got a nice burn on. We were kicked outta there a little earlier than we had hoped by formidable clouds rolling over from the “mainland” (Luzon).

For our last night, we grabbed a meal at the far end of the bay and watched the relentless lightning striking about every 5 seconds (no joke) over Luzon and the ocean. Later we got shit face on Red Horse on the floating bar, and did flips and shit off the side.

Anything else......oh yah. Priya got shat on by a bat, and I broke my first pair of sandals.